Christmas shopping wasn’t always this easy. Go online, place your order, go to the front door and it’s waiting for you. Not unlike the gag in Bugs Bunny cartoons in which he runs to a mail box, jots down a note, mails it, and seconds later a courier on a motor scooter arrives announcing, “Package for Bugs Bunny.”

The package would contain a pie, TNT or an Acme anvil with which Bugs would use to assault his pursuing tormentor.

OK, so online shopping is not that fast. At least not yet. But as online shopping continues to eradicate brick-and-mortar retailers like Kmart, J.C. Penney and Sears, it’s worth noting that those very stores were largely responsible for the demise of a previous generation of shopping, the catalog showroom.

You may remember them. Service Merchandise, Value House and Consumers Distributing, among others. They flourished from the 1950s through the 70s, crawling to an end by the early 90s. They filled a gap as they opened in suburban areas before the department stores moved out of downtown locations.

They sold items like jewelry, electronics and luggage. Basically the prizes from “The Price Is Right” sans the cars and motorhomes. And no clothing.

Set up like a high-end store, you could browse the showroom at your leisure, choosing your items. Then it got complicated.

When you picked something you liked, say a Soundesign stereo with AM-FM radio and 8-track player, you didn’t pay a clerk and leave with it. You left the pleasant ambiance of the showroom and entered the payment chamber, which had the milieu of the South Third Street Bus Station.

But before you entered, you had to fill out a form for your potential purchase. A triplicate tablet of white, yellow and pink carbon copies was filled out with a pencil stub provided by the store. You had to write your name and address, the name of the item, the stock number and the price. You took it to Marge at the cash register, and after a lengthy wait in the checkout lines, paid her, and she gave you back a copy with the register tape receipt stapled to it. The pink copy was throw in a bin where Earl would retrieve it during his periodic forays from the stock room.

Then you sat. And sat. And watched the conveyor belt with the same face you have when waiting for your luggage to arrive at the airport.

Earl emerges about now with a handful of pink sheets, rubber-stamped with a cold, dreaded message: “OUT OF STOCK!” In this pre-database era the only way to determine if an item was in stock was to go look for it. And in this case, they didn’t find it.

So now Marge directs you to another line where you wait and wait for the opportunity to get your money back for the item that never existed in the first place. It started to feel like you were involved in some sort of money-laundering deal.

But that’s how we shopped, and we liked it. Well, not really. Shopping then and now involved spending a lot of time online. At least today you can sit.